At the centre of “They Build Homes with Clouds” (2026), at least in the configuration I saw, is a landscape: a body of water hugged by rocks under a shining moon, as soft and atmospheric as a watercolour. Look closely and it dissolves into thousands of tiny hand-stitched crosses. Around it sit four abstract panels in a checkered pattern, each in its own palette — dusky red, green, purple and yellow. None of this is fixed. The panels could be taken down and hung another way — the landscape pushed off-center, the colours reshuffled, the whole thing broken apart and reset.
That instability is the subject of “No History of Shapes,” Jordan Nassar’s second solo exhibition with Dubai’s “The Third Line,” on view at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street in London through Oct. 24. It is half of a larger whole: a companion show at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles that presents the rest of the same body of work. The London presentation was originally due to open in Dubai earlier this year, but was postponed and reformatted in response to the U.S-Iran war, which saw missiles and drones target the UAE.
The title comes from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Describing Clouds,” which Nassar found while reading Palestinian poetry in search of language for what the new embroideries were doing — “parts forming a whole, being broken apart, and then being put back together to form a different whole,” as he told me. The poem, he said, is about the impossibility of describing a cloud, “because by the time you’ve described it, it’s already a different shape.” He hears in it the condition of Palestine itself, where road closures, checkpoints, settlements and demolitions arrive faster than anyone can absorb them. “There is no time to describe and make sense of one change before another one happens,” he said. For the diaspora, who may not be able to reach the homeland, “you end up making the place into what you need it to be. The shapes keep changing, and there’s no fixing them in place.”
Nassar is most celebrated for his embroidery-focused practice, with his principal medium “tatreez,” the Palestinian tradition of cross-stitch embroidery recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. Worked for centuries by women onto thobes, jackets and veils, “tatreez” is a language as much as an ornament: patterns and colours vary from village to village and region to region – Ramallah, Gaza, Hebron – signaling where a woman came from and her social and marital status. After the Nakba in 1948, women in refugee camps kept stitching as an act of memory; during the First Intifada, maps, political symbols and the colours of the Palestinian flag entered the repertoire.
Nassar grew up in a Palestinian-American household in New York, surrounded by embroidered pillowcases and wall hangings, and fell in love with the craft as a teenager when his father took him to Palestine just before the Second Intifada. But it took years before he felt entitled to it. “For a long time I carried a sense of not being ‘Palestinian enough,’” he said. “I grew up in New York, and I don’t speak Arabic natively — and the work grew directly out of that feeling.” He has since come to see himself as inside the tradition rather than outside it. “Palestinian embroidery isn’t static,” he said, “and the diaspora is part of its living story.”
The new works carry that living story somewhere unexpected: toward Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, the Iranian artist whose mirror mosaics fused Persian geometry with modernist abstraction. (Nassar jokes that his favorite artists are all octogenarian women: Monir, Etel Adnan, Dorothy Iannone.) He had responded to her once before, in a 2022 series of woodworks after her “Third Family” sculptures. This time his source is her “Convertible” series — multipart reliefs that can be reorganized into different configurations. “They’re convertible, meaning you can rearrange them and see them multiple ways, so one work becomes many, with a kind of infiniteness to it,” he said. “That idea sat in the back of my mind for years.”
Translating it into thread meant inventing a method from scratch, and the results are among the most formally ambitious pieces Nassar has made. Bands of dense tatreez pattern meet passages of open landscape, and the panels fit together into larger geometric wholes that could just as easily be split apart and rebuilt. Where Farmanfarmaian’s convertibles are pure abstraction, Nassar uses the cross-stitch grid to make pictures. Still, he sees the two practices as rhyming rather than resisting each other — both rooted in meticulous craft, both made at a distance from home. “Monir lived in America because of the Islamic Revolution; I’m a Palestinian who grew up in America as my family left the homeland a long time ago,” he said. “That shared condition is where the languages really rhyme.”
The making is collaborative in a way that builds multiple outcomes into every stitch. Nassar designs the pattern, stitches, size and shape of each panel, lays it out in black on white, and sends it to an embroidery workshop in Ramallah run by Palestinian women. The brief is loose, and crucially, he does not say where each colour should go. “The same panel, if stitched by six different women, comes back six different ways,” he said. Nor can he dictate exact shades. “They have what they have,” Gabriella Moore, director at “The Third Line,” told me of the threads the embroiderers work with. What returns, Nassar said, carries “each woman’s own creativity and matrilineal influence: styles learned from their mothers and grandmothers.” He controls only his own part, the landscapes, which are stitched in his New York studio. The aim is to put “‘the real way’ of doing it, by Palestinian women in Palestine, together with my way, which is diasporic and individualistic, and let the two sit in one piece.”
That surrender of control extends to whoever eventually owns the work. Who decides how the panels are arranged, I ask? “The openness is the whole point, so I’m glad to give that decision away,” Nassar said. “You can make each piece fit whatever space you have — pack it tight, stretch it tall or wide. That’s exactly how the diaspora relates to Palestine, making it fit into our lives however we need it, rather than it being one fixed place.”
The landscapes themselves are invented, as Nassar never works from photographs or real views; the hills and waters come from his own imagination and from his father’s, “as he described a Palestine to us that he was partly imagining himself, having carried it across distance and generations.” That accounts for their dreamlike, almost painterly glow. “They’re what Palestine could hypothetically be, to someone far from it,” he said. “The landscapes are fantastical, utopian.”
If the embroideries imagine, the mosaics — tucked in the back room of No.9 — reconstruct. Five small, jewel-bright studies in hand-cut smalti, they reproduce details of a Byzantine mosaic at Jabalia in northern Gaza: a lion, a human figure, passages of abstract pattern and — most arresting to me — an orange tree, its fruit glowing against the ground. There is no grout between the tesserae; the glass is glued from beneath and set in metal frames, so the pieces sit edge to edge, like a surface reassembled from shards. The colours are more vibrant than those of the original, which Nassar has described as an attempt to imagine how it may once have looked.
The series began with an earlier encounter: Byzantine mosaics excavated from churches in Palestine that hang on the wall approaching passport control at Ben Gurion Airport. “Seeing them got me wondering why Israel would want those to be the first thing visitors see,” he said, “and I started thinking about how antiquities get used for propaganda by the state.” His attention then turned to sites in Gaza damaged or destroyed since 2023. Good images of the Jabalia mosaic were hard to find, so he worked from news footage, pausing and screenshotting frames to work out how the parts connected, and filling gaps by inference or by borrowing from comparable mosaics. “There’s something painful and tender in rebuilding an object, painstakingly, piece by piece, that has been so compromised or destroyed,” he said.
Nassar cuts and sets the glass with his studio team in Brooklyn, and he describes the process as the inverse of embroidery. Stitching is “a way of slowing down to imagine and construct a place,” whereas with the mosaics, “I’m reconstructing something real and historical that exists in the world, so the process becomes more archival.”
They are also the more overtly political strand of the show. He began making mosaics after Oct. 7, 2023, and sees them as exposing a contradiction: a state that projects itself as a guardian of antiquity while destroying Gaza’s heritage, and that in the West Bank uses archaeological sites to seize land. “Part of the idea is that if someone wants to learn more about the original mosaic, they’ll inevitably come up against what’s happening in Gaza,” he said. In a conversation with the architect Sumayya Vally published alongside the exhibition, he distinguishes between artists who take up craft out of nostalgia and those who do so because it is in danger. Palestinian embroidery, he told her, faces a threat “not of fading away, but of being intentionally erased and destroyed.”
Like the embroideries, the mosaic studies can be moved around to suggest different wholes, and they find their completion in Los Angeles, where Nassar has recreated a larger section of the same mosaic. The lion in one London study reappears there, alongside a tree and a group of animals. “Across the two exhibitions, you’re zooming in and out of a single historical mosaic,” he said. “I like that the work has to be reassembled in the viewer’s mind across the distance between the two galleries.” It is a fitting structure for a show about diaspora: a whole that no single visitor can see at once.
For all its gravity, “No History of Shapes” never loses sight of pleasure. Nassar argues that affirming “beauty and creativity from Palestine,” when so much attention is fixed on violence and loss, is itself “deeply political.” He hopes viewers will recognize “the longing for a place you belong to but aren’t in direct contact with, the tenderness of holding onto something being lost, and the insistence of a living culture.” In a Mayfair gallery, a cross-stitched moon over an imagined shore does just that; it is beautiful first – and only then do you notice it is in pieces, and that it could be put together otherwise.
“No History of Shapes” is on view at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, London, through October 24.
